I was searching for a solution to a small Spotify bug and found this user praise: Spotify is what napster was for ten years ago.

Then another user replied:

how do you mean?

ten years ago Napster was an illegal channel for sharing and downloading music, built p2p.

are you ironic and i missed the punchline?

Fair enough. But still this guy had a point. Spotify is not the same thing as Napster, but another milestone in the Music Industry transformation.

Napster started a revolution. I’m not talking about piracy, I’m talking about spreading the message that the current formats were obsolete and people had different musical needs. The success of the iTunes Store is a good proof of that.

Spotify, as I see it, is the beginning of the end of that revolution. Say goodbye to useless CDs and DVDs. Goodbye to paying for an album with a couple of good songs and crap for filling.

The next logical step would be a Spotify for video.

The only thing I’ve seen coming from the (music and movie) industry in the last 10 years has been the message that piracy was illegal, and immoral, and that it would kill the music and movies. Maybe they have a point, maybe not.

Recently, they’ve been trying to ban download sites in Spain. What then? Without P2P:

• I can only get movies on theaters (when/where they want) or DVD (how they want). Theaters are expensive (especially if you account for most of the movies not being worth the price) and I just don’t see myself going to a store or having to wait for a DVD to arrive to watch a movie
• If you want movies in VO, there are little options. Thankfully we have now one cinema playing VO movies in our town, but still not enough
• If you want TV Shows on VO you have to wait until the DVD comes out. Most of the successful shows are on TV, but delayed for weeks (or even months) and in Spanish

I found a quote yesterday that summed it up pretty well:

“People don’t go out of their way to pirate movies and TV programs; they’re not intrinsically bad people. They do it because often it’s quicker and easier than legitimate means. The quicker the film and TV industries recognise this and make it as easy to buy legal content as it is to download illegitimate content, the more likely they are to stem the flow.”

But I believe if they shut up for a minute and listen, they’d realize there’s people willing to pay, but they are not selling to them.